


Survivor

by seidenapfel



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hopeful Ending, POV Original Character, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), What Happened in Budapest (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 07:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23967964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seidenapfel/pseuds/seidenapfel
Summary: Reflexions of a survivor in the aftermath ofThe Avengers.





	Survivor

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** dancing, protector, war, past, survivor  
> Written for _Challenge 18: Prompted_ at Livejournal's WLREUNION. Not beta'd.  
> Written: 2013-03-30

She looked down the street. Although she had expected destruction, the actual scenery exceeded her imagination. Some years ago she had experienced something similar in this town, yet never to this extent. This had not only been a fight between two opponents, this had been a war, an actual war in the centre of New York. How many would have died, she couldn’t think of. All she saw now was the silence after the storm – a short moment between the battle and the aftermath. Survivors like her who found their way back to the streets, reporters who positioned themselves on the abandoned battle field, astonished faces who still couldn’t grasp what had happened. Who knew? She didn’t and for now it didn’t bother her.

On the contrary, she felt safe. Whatever the media would make of it, she knew her six protectors and had seen them fight, saving hundreds and hundreds of people, and risking their lives for the town and the whole world.

Nevertheless, she imagined – no, she even knew exactly – what would happen next. Some reporters and so called experts would devour their protectors and accuse them for everything bad in the world, whereas the rest would praise them without second thoughts. Nobody or only a few fledglings or actual realists would take the medial way and look deeper into both sides.

How she knew all this? First of all, she observed and analysed her environment. Never did she allow herself to form an opinion before she had weighted every argument out. Moreover, she was a survivor. Since she had come to New York to live with her daughter’s family or at least in their neighbourhood she had seen the difference between the English countryside and this melting pot. In her English hometown, which was a mere hamlet, it had been peaceful for years and years.

Why would that make her a survivor? It didn’t, except for the time of her childhood during the war, when every person who had lived through it had survived. She was a survivor since she first came to New York, since the day a yellowish monster had climbed up her apartment house only to be stopped by a green one the newspapers called The Hulk. She had fled from her living room and hid in her bathroom while half her dwelling was being destroyed.

She was a survivor since she had been to Flushing Meadows to visit the Stark Expo with her grandchildren. Later she often had wondered why she had chosen that particular day for their visit. The day when Justin Hammer had presented his new weapons was another break in her life. Thanks to one quick reaction of Iron Man she and her two boys had been saved from one of the robots or drones or whatever those war machines were called.

After this incident her daughter had left the town with her family, to as she said a safer place somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Although it actually had been the middle of nowhere, a small town in New Mexico, it hadn’t helped to escape the terror of supernatural battles. Just when she had visited her family for the first time, a found hammer had stirred the neighbourhood and was the harbinger of another catastrophe. Once again she was rescued as well as her family, but her daughter, completely hysteric, forbid her to visit them ever again. So Thor had been the reason for her alienation from her family. However, she didn’t blame him or her fate. As the Hulk and Iron Man before, this unearthly hero had protected her and she was grateful.

Then there had been the short visit to Budapest which she preferred not to think of and gladly couldn’t remember. Nevertheless, after she had had a glimpse of the woman in black and the one with the arrows today, they seemed somehow strangely familiar.

However, there was the sixth member of their group and his face had pierced her heart. It couldn’t be and yet he looked exactly like the man of her memories. Memories long thought to be forgotten or at least sealed away in the attics of her brain. This man roused dark pictures of a time far away in the past, during the war. His face, his stature, his movement, everything was genuine, but it couldn’t be. It had been seventy years ago and this man was but thirty. And yet – she sighed, while memories flashed before her eyes. This man had been her saviour, her guarding angel, the man who had saved her life when he took her into his strong arms and shielded her from the bombs at a place where she actually hadn’t been allowed to be. A tear ran over her face while she was still standing on the street of modern New York but actually was again the little girl hiding under a table in the wardroom of an air base. Her mother had worked there, her was father was a pilot. Living in the little town next to the base, she often stole into the base or the local inn to watch the dancing and other moments of eager happiness in a time of all-embracing fear and death. Being a constant guest, she was tolerated after all attempts to keep her away had failed and as long as she didn’t disturb anyone. One day, the bombs came and from one moment to another the happy atmosphere was turned into dust and devastation. That day she had lost her mother, but for the first time in her life she had been a survivor, rescued by a fair-headed American captain.

The shadings before her eyes cleared away and her look fell onto the Stark Tower in front of her. The silence had gone by and a tempest of voices and screams, fear and relief, shock and elation, – short, all kind of human life and emotion – filled the air.

All she did was smiling. Whatever it was that forced her to cross paths with these six people again and again, it was something, as strange as it might sound to others, which gave her hope. She knew she had not one but six guardian angels who would rescue her anytime and anywhere. Whatever would happen next, she looked forward to it. The planet was safe as long as these heroes watched over it.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Disclaimer:**  
>  Being the property of their respective copyright holders, _The Avengers_ , its characters or any other publicly recognisable names don't belong to me in any way, shape or form. No copyright infringement is intended.


End file.
